Democrats have a problem in Virginia, elsewhere

Wesley Pruden:

This is one Mr. Deeds who apparently isn't going to town. The collapse of the Democratic campaign for governor of Virginia speaks volumes - chapters, anyway - about what the body politic is trying to tell Barack Obama's Democrats.

They're learning, painfully, that campaigning without George W. Bush is baffling, frustrating and scary. Worse, it offers a preview of what the congressional campaigning will be like next year. One Obama doorbell ringer, working neighborhoods in Northern Virginia for Creigh Deeds, says even the promise of free pizza can't lure faithful Democrats to a rally.

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Suddenly, the White House is treating the bereft Mr. Deeds as if he's on the fourth day of a three-day underarm deodorant pad. Bill Clinton, accustomed to speaking to cheering thousands at a hundred grand a pop, was dispatched the other night to a Deeds rally to set the throng on fire with one of his late-October stumpwallopers. The rally, such as it was, was held not at an arena or a hotel - not even a Motel 6 - but in a campaign office in the Washington suburbs. The "throng" was counted in the dozens, about the size of a PTA meeting. Not even Bubba could dispel the gloom of a wake.

"These polls are either accurate, or they're not," he said, delivering an insight worthy of a Harvard political science professor....

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Mr. Deeds' friends are bitter about the anonymous voices peddling the discouraging word from the White House. "These 'anonymous voices' have decided those hard-working [down-ballot candidates] are just collateral damage in their effort to tell the world that if [Mr.] Deeds doesn't win, it is because he ignored advice," Paul Goldman, a former chairman of the Virginia Democratic Party, tells Politico, the Washington politics daily. "This isn't change we can believe in, but the same old, same old we voted out of office. Do they really believe their attempts to shield the president from blame is going to distract [Mr.] Obama's critics, much less change the arc of today's politics?"

Of course it won't, and that's what makes the Virginia race so scary for the president's men. Voters will use whatever club is available to "send a message," and sometimes, as any number of pols could tell you, the club is big, rough and means business.

The more things go against this administration the more they lash out, not just at opponents , but at the people on their side. It will make even more people wary of getting too close to them. Meanwhile, John Corzine has shown the way to win despite the Obama albatross. Certainly issues are not the ticket to victory, but spending unlimited funds on negative ads will drag down an opponent. I thought Democrats were against that.